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Nerval's Lobster writes "Federal regulators are starting to make noise about Bitcoin, the digital currency that's gained in recognition and value over the past few years: the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is offering up 'guidance' for digital currency and those who use it as part of commerce. But the Bitcoin Foundation, which is devoted to standardizing and promoting the currency, doesn't like that idea; as Patric Murck, the organization's general counsel, wrote in a March 19 blog posting: 'If FinCEN would like to expand its statutory authority over "money transmitters" to include brand new categories such as "administrators" and "exchangers" of digital currency it must do so through proper rulemaking proceedings and not by fiat.' If Bitcoin continues to gain in value, it could spark a rise in virtual currencies—and force some very interesting discussions over regulation. But here's the question: would regulation actually be good for Bitcoin, if it made organizations and businesses more comfortable with using it as a currency?"

Bitcoin will surely come down from current levels. That's because, there is a constant downward pressure on price, due to mining.

Energy spent on mining is probably the biggest part of total costs of running Bitcoin network. Also, this energy is easy to predict, because energy spent on mining is a simple function of Bitcoin price and average total block awards. This is because mining has very low barrier of entry, and this ensures that as long as it is profitable, new miners will join, until the most inefficient miners are at the break-even point. And the most profitable miners will try to expand their operation.

This makes it that each block costs somewhere around (0.5 * block award * price) to (0.75 * block award * price). And since awards are paid in Bitcoins and electricity is paid in local currencies, this makes the situation that all mining costs hit the exchanges every day, and push the price down.

This can currently be estimated to be $150.000 to $250.000 each day (using price of $90), and this amount of fresh money must enter the exchanges every day, or the price will go down. Currently, this money comes in from "suckers".

At this point we have a temporary delay in the "mining difficulty follows price" process , because of the change in technology and delays in deliveries of ASIC miners, so mining is very profitable at this point, and this reduces the selling pressure on exchanges. This, plus block award halving is why we have this current Bitcoin bubble.

And this bubble will end soon, because of the process described above.

I'm confused about which variables are linked to what here. It seems to me that the way you have linked the price of electricity, the price of bitcoins and the value of money is a little more complicated than a simpler demand and supply model could explain. I'm not sure that the price of electricity controls anything but how many people choose to mine instead of buy bitcoins. And I wouldn't think that the price of electricity would be involved much in determining the value of bitcoins themselves (because in

Yes, I had written is wrong. Not total energy, but total cost of energy spent on mining is a simple function of Bitcoin price and total awards. It tends to some number close to those two multiplied together (price * total awards)

It is not a supply and demand curve because there is a kink in the curve. Computation costs (electricity, cost of GPUs, etc) put a kink in the supply curve.

The Supply curve generally has a positive slope. As there is more demand for bitcoin (i.e. as the price goes up) the more resources will be thrown at it. The opposite is true as well – the less demand the fewer resources will be thrown at it – until you get to the point where the cost to mine a bitcoin falls before the cost of mining it

The price of bitcoins is determined by the things that end up on the exchange.

(Ok, some things on this list are duplicate, sorry about that)

So, things that do not (or should not) directly effect the price, simply because no exchange is needed:-transactions inside the bitcoin economy.-roundtripping: buyer buys bitcoins, buys items from seller, seller sells the same amount of bitcoins.

Things that indirectly effect the price:-more vendors accept BTC (more people will speculat

There are no conceptual flaws in the implementation of Bitcoin that I can foresee,

Well if TFA (first link) didn't point out a conceptual flaw then you weren't trying very hard.

When virtually the first mention of Bitcoin in any official capacity comes from "Financial Crimes Enforcement Network" of the US Treasury department, you can pretty much see that it would only take one or two government agencies throwing their weight around and equating Bitcoin with some form of crime to pretty much bring Bitcoin crashing down.

By the very way Bitcoin works, several aspects of it fall under the clai

You might think bitcoin is impossible to control, but you're misinformed. The immediate rollback from 0.8 proves that all it requires is the large mining pools to reach a decision behind closed doors, and they'll implement whatever modified protocol they desire. The problem with such power being in the hands of the pools and large miners means all the government has to do is change them minds of 10 people, and they'll introduce whatever tracking/anti-laundering controls they desire right at the point of exc

The immediate rollback from 0.8 proves that all it requires is the large mining pools to reach a decision behind closed doors, and they'll implement whatever modified protocol they desire.

If most of the power lies with the active miners, then perhaps there will be a temptation to change the protocol to increase the production rate. The people sitting on huge stacks of previously mined bitcoins don't seem to be have much control over the current mining/validation.

Indeed, you can't even spend bitcoin without the consent of the miners.

In fact, there is no obligation for the miners to allow any bitcoin to be spent at all (though if they did that they'd find it hard to spend their own bitcoin). They could simply generate new blocks and not include any transactions in them at all.

It does self-regulate to some extent. If you offered a $100k transaction fee for your transaction I'm sure somebody would be willing to spend some CPU cycles to get a block and list your trans

So many posters here like to lament that lots of so-called "inventions" and patents are simply real world concepts with "on the internet" attached to it, so those should not be an invention nor should it be treated differently than their real life counterpart. E.g. selling songs on the Internet should be no different from selling songs on CD, i.e. you should be able to resell or lend it.

Yet when it comes to Bitcoin, which is practically "money... on the Internet!", all common sense got thrown out of the window.

Cannot control? How can the government control the movements of small sheets of paper (i.e. cash)? Yet cash movement is still regulated. Same with small pieces of metal (i.e. gold, platinum, silver), or small bits of crystal (i.e. diamonds). Heck, even export of mathematical algorithms (encryption), information (movies, songs, classified documents) have been regulated in the past.

The real world is not WoW, the authorities can and do have laws in effect without first needing the ability to make that law impossible to break in the world. The law is not a game, you won't get away with something simply because the physical world do not prevent you from doing it like you do with using aimbots and cheats.

Bitcoin ARE already regulated just as everything of value is regulated. i.e. You can certainly _try_ to take a bag of diamond across border, and you will very likely succeed, though if you got caught, you will face harsh penalties. Similarly, you can certainly go ahead to transfer a large amounts of Bitcoins across borders, and you will most likely succeed without getting caught. But IF some law enforcement decided to target you, that transfer will be something they can get you punished for.

Who wants to have control over this are people like Chuck Schumer. They get off on telling people what to do. If some dumbass wants to get high on weed, Chuck Schumer wants to put him in jail. Chuck Schumer also foolishly asked the DOJ to seize the Silk Road's domain name. Chuck Schumer and his kind don't like bitcoin because they can't control it. They can and do control mastercard, visa, and paypal. If the US government doesn't like you enough, they'll make sure nobody in the world can pay money to you electronically, even if they aren't trading in US currency.

As for banks? Banks will always be around, period. Besides, I'd rather banks exist than not. In fact, I know this is going to be controversial, but those scam check advance and title loan agencies should be around too. Why? When stupid people get desperate, they make stupid moves, which includes stupid borrowing choices. It's either they go to these companies, or they go to loan sharks. Loan sharks answer to nobody but themselves, and if these stupid people borrow from them, things get much worse. Unlike loan sharks, scam companies can't rough up your wife, break your legs, or shoot up your house. They don't fund organized crime, and it actually is possible to pay them off. When you think you've paid off a loan shark, chances are he says you were a minute too late to the meeting and you owe him double interest. Repeat forever. Loan sharks are NOT subject to usury laws.

Not only that, but regular people make money off of banks. I do it all the time. If you ever need to start a business, often times banks are the best source of quick capital. Need to buy a home? Same thing. I rather like it that banks exist.

You usually don't tax OR regulate money of any type. Except for special circumstances you can't. You tax and regulate exchanges of money. The government doesn't tax you on how much money you have, they tax you on how much you earn and spend. You can already get around a lot of taxing and regulation if you use cash. But if you, for example, own a store, and you do it on a large scale, you might be caught when you get audited and somebody notices that your inventory keeps disappearing.

There are a few depositors in Cypriot banks that might disagree. Also, Pennsylvania attempted to institute a Personal Property Tax on its residents about a decade ago. In the PA case, it fell apart because no one wanted to report their personal property to the state, and the state had no way to track out-of-state accounts, whether bank accounts, mutual funds, or brokerage accounts, nor had they any way of tracking what in the Middle Ages were called Movables, like jewelry, coin collections, art, etc. Tha

My understanding is:1) A bitcoin is 100 million Satoshis. A satoshi is the smallest amount of value that can be exchanged on the bitcoin network. Each transaction on the bitcoin network transfers some number of Satoshis from one address to another. The number of bitcoins a wallet/person owns is the sum of the number of all the Satoshis that have been transferred to addresses in wallets they own minus the number of Satoshis sent *from* addresses in wallets they own, all divided by 100 million.2) 100 million

A Bitcoin is nothing more than a rivalrous good (or an attempt at one), and other rivalrous goods have already been shown to be acceptable mediums of exhange (like cigarettes or sea shells). It just happens so that this involves computers.

So how hard is it to carry a few billion dollars worth of cigarettes or sea shells? For bit coins, it's as hard as carrying a memory stick.

Why did they divvy it up this way? Since it exists only on computers, they could have divided it into 1,073,741,824 (2^30) parts for the smallest value. But what when the value grows and bitcoins need to be divided into more? Wouldn't Satoshis appreciate as well?

One (or more than one) of the editors/staff is in to it and thus they push it here. Bitcoin is only valuable so long as people keep giving a shit and buying in to it. If suddenly everyone ignored it, the value would drop to zero. It has no national economy behind it, there are no taxes you can pay with it, there is no reason to hold it unless you are playing the bubble game with it. So those in Bitcoins need it to keep getting hype.

Well it's not a very effective strategy since most up-voted posts are against the technology.

I'm starting to find the sociology of bitcoin even more interesting then bitcoin. It's fascinating how people are so passionately against a piece of crypto technology. Many people seem to have such a visceral dislike for it long before really understanding the fundamental technology. It's as if people kept yelling about how/. should stop posting about some new programming language.

While I'm no bitcoin miner, how is this sentence "only valuable so long as people keep giving a shit and buying in to it. If suddenly everyone ignored it, the value would drop to zero" any different to our current system?

Well as a world traveler I'd disagree with you a bit on your characterization of the ubiquity of the US dollar. Nevertheless, I agree the USD is an extremely convenient and well respected currency, with lots of lovely features pursuant to being issued from one of the most successful countries in the world. However that is not an argument against bitcoin.

You are correct that no large organizations accepts bitcoin for payment yet (whether they consider it a 'real currency' is rather harder to ascertain). It d

"What is BitCoin if not exchangeable? BitCoin's don't do anything. That string of bits doesn't do anything unique"Bitcoin does do something unique. It has unique properties. It can be exchanged almost instant among people anywhere in the world. No new hidden or unexpected cache of it can never be discovered that could reduce any value it represents. And anyone can detect a counterfeit without knowing a single thing about it. And once someone has given it to you they can't take it back. Despite there being n

National currencies are backed by large organizations (national governments) with lots of guns (national militaries). If, for example, some shopkeeper in the US decided to stop accepting US dollars, he'd get a nice visit from a man with a gun. On a larger scale, when Iraq decided they were going to stop accepting US dollars, they got a nice visit from a bunch of men with guns (and aircraft carriers). That last one might have been a coincidence, but the first one definitely isn't.

So yes, all currencies are just theoretical constructs, they have value purely because we believe they do. Yes even in the case of things like gold coins. If the world suddenly decided to stop taking a currency, it would cease to be one. Money is only money if you can spend it, and money is only money if people do spend it.

However the difference is that US dollars are legal tender in the US. What that means is the government requires taxes to be paid in them, and so all of the country's residents who pay ta

1. Government doesn't care about stability. They care about being able to tax it.2. Government doesn't care about stability. They care about being able to tax it.3. Government doesn't care about stability. They care about being able to tax it.4. Government doesn't care about stability. They care about being able to tax it.

Actually, no. As a rule governments do care about stability - more accurately they care that they have final control over the stability so that they can game the system as they see fit. For an extreme example see exhibit A: every case of hyperinflation, ever. Now I suppose you could consider inflation a savings tax, but very few economists (or governments) will actually term it such.

If regulation is based out if the USA that will make it a no-go for me. The US already illegally snoops my EU-based bank account, illegally gets my UK-based purchase data and has illegally obtained SWIFT data in the past. A US-based regulator is not to be trusted.

Perhaps a more pertinent question would be this - if an international currency is to be regulated, who should be in charge of the regulation? Who has jurisdiction?

In science fiction (at least, in games, not so sure about literature) we often see the term 'credit' used to refer to some vague internationally accepted currency. But if such a thing existed (and bitcoin might be heading that way), who sets the rules on it? if it's 'every country', then the concept breaks down and the currency becomes unworkable as you start having to track too much to use it. If it's the UN? I don't see the US ever accepting that.

So that leaves the only workable answer as the originators or the currency.

Regardless, different nations can tax transactions in the currency with the same rules they use for domestic currencies. If the currency is processed by a domestic bank or financial institution, they'd have to process it in much the same way as they would any other transaction. So it seems the simplest way to handle these things is just to make it clear in the law (if it isn't already) that all transactions, regardless of currency, must adhere to the same rules.

Exchanges have been compromised, customers have lost money, basic protections are absent. It is used freely for the silk road drug trade, hiding money from governments and evading taxes. Can anyone seriously make the argument that it won't be regulated?

being its so hard to track it would not change anything. evading what tax in most states there is no tax with online transactions. this is more the government trying get there hand in the cookie jar because the value has gone up.

Income that is earned through the exchange of services with another person, whether in the form of bitcoins, dollars, or barter; is included in gross income, and would be subject to income tax at applicable rates. Also these bitcoins could be subject to self employment tax.

In some jurisdictions, income earned through the process of buying and selling bitcoins would also be included in gross income, but would be treated as capital gains.

Note: The above interpretation is based on the assumption bitcoins are treated as a store of value such as gold, or other such commodity. If instead they are treated as a currency or debt, the full gain could be taxed based on market value at the end of each tax year. 3858 IRS Ends Currency ETN Adantage Simply put, the IRS never considers currency a long-term investment. Consequently, if bitcoins are treated as a currency, you will be taxed the same as holding an account in any non-functional (foreign) currency.

I.e. if bitcoins are treated the same as gold coins, then for every transaction, one must calculate the capital gains or loss, and pay 28% tax on the total net gain on Form 1040 Schedule D. For anyone who tries to comply with U.S. tax code, such as those seeking political office or security clearance, this makes it impractical to use bitcoins for everyday transactions, and practical only for occasional, large transactions such as investing in bitcoins for the medium or long term.

I'm pretty sure you only pay capital gains upon those gains actually being realized. For example, if you own a house that suddenly doubles in value, you aren't expected to pay any taxes* on those gains until you sell it. Otherwise they could very well be taxing you for money that you never earned and possibly don't even have. I don't think the government would fare too well if they booted you out of your house because you haven't paid them on the income that you never received.

bitcoin isnt a popularity contest, its an open distributed currency that was originally created to get away from the current system. asking if government regulation is a good tradeoff for increased popularity means you clearly dont get why people created bitcoin or are switching to bitcoin

No. Bitcoin was created as a plaything "fun with crypto" proof-of-concept and was never intended to be used for anything more. A bunch of people who wanted to get away from the current system (both those with hopes of striking it rich as a early adopter and those who needed a new currency for less-than-legal activities online after e-gold got shut down) latched on and that's where we are at now.

The bitcoin protocol is showing its weaknesses every day, particularly when it comes to scaling up to higher transaction volumes. The blockchain is getting bloated by SatoshiDice which is a nearly perfect transaction spamming system and the bugs in the older clients which nearly forked the blockchain a while ago mean there is presently a hard limit to the number of transactions registered every 10 minutes. Combined with the fact that some miners set the number of transactions they process if they hit a block to be very low in order to try and beat out others (smaller block propagate ever so slightly faster) and there is now a very real delay in transactions going through: more than enough to scuttle any chance to use bitcoin for anything other than a curiosity and which will only get worse.

there is now a very real delay in transactions going through: more than enough to scuttle any chance to use bitcoin for anything other than a curiosity and which will only get worse.

Nonatomicity of transactions (caused by delays in processing, for example) will result in you being able to pay for two products with the same bitcoin. Credit card transactions are atomic, and besides c/c does not transfer assets. BC transactions do that.

While an Internet seller may be able to detect the failure in time and refuse to ship, a brick-and-mortar store cannot do the same; so if several people walk in with copies of the same wallet and buy a $1,000 TV at the exact same time their transactions will be registered.

The official solution is to wait for several (six) confirmation blocks. But that can take 10 minutes on average - and more if BC sees more use. Do I want to wait 10 to 30 minutes at the store until my payment goes through? No way. Those [mythical?] BC users who buy coffee with their BCs, do they wait 10 minutes before they are given a cup?

That's not really that much of a problem. Big transactions take time. When I bought my car I had to wait a day for the dealership to confirm that my cheque was good. I could have gotten around that by getting it certified by a bank, but only if I stored my money with that bank already.

Small transactions will be on the (short term) honour system. I the days before we had electronic credit card verification the store would take an imprint and only find out later whether the card was good or not. If you d

all forms of currency should be regulated, else there will be abuse, it's that simple and it's been proven historically over and over again.. Even today, normal currency gets counterfeited.. So, digital currency can't?

Show me how you can -truly- counterfeit gold/silver, the only things that have been historically always accepted as money. Sure, you can try to fake it with brass/white metal but under any sort of inspection it fails miserably, its density won't be close to gold and so it will either be the wrong weight or wrong diameter. You can try to fake gold with tungsten but, in all but the largest bars, a simple punch (like what you see on silver/gold bullion ranging from antiquity to present) will bring the counter

Bitcoin was built to evade controls. Sure you can regulate that transactions above a certain amount must be reported, but good luck enforcing it. Transactions can be split into thousand of components at no cost, be dispatched through mixers to thousands of wallets. If the government become savvy enough to track such movements, then anonymous internet banking with chaumian cash can be implemented on top of bitcoin.

So if regulation gives the government the temporary illusion that it's controlling bitcoin, the

One of the founders of a currency designed from the ground up to be resilient to Government intervention, is now complaining that the Government wants to intervene. Have they realised they failed in their mission (which at this point, I think is too early to say) or were they naively hoping it would never actually happen.
Or maybe, the anti Big Brother thing was just marketing and they actually expected the whole thing to collapse (and they would have cashed out) long before that point.

They haven't failed in anything. There is no central authority on bitcoins, so I'm not sure what or who they would regulate. That would be like saying the government could regulate the tor network. If they had that much power, the Silk Road would be gone already.

Money is a "I owe you" As long as we play the game and use fiat money the governments can regulate but there are so many kinds of alternative currencies becoming more popular.

It is quite common to do a plumbing job for a mate and have the mate come around one weekend to build a fence. I owe you. Currencies can take so many forms and those that are trusted will become main stream.

After I have done a plumbing job for my mate he owes me building a fence. However, I don't need a fence but my neighbor who is a baker does. What I do need is bread. I can go to the baker and pass on my mates debt of building a fence to the baker in exchange for bread but if my mate has a bad reputation and the baker doesn't trust my mates promise then there can't be a deal.

Governments can only regulate through compulsion. Fiat money that may not be refused as a legal tender. But with bitcoin, they don't appear in the game at all. I like that.

Clearly everybody involved with Bitcoin does not want to be regulated - if they did it would have been designed differently.

So the actual question here is, "should an unregulated currency be allowed to exist?" Or, without the euphemisms and passive voice, "should we bust the heads of people who use an unregulated digital currency?"

I prefer your second choice of conceptualizing the question. The phrase "should X be allowed" puts the burden of proof on choosing freedom, but I prefer that freedom always be the default choice until otherwise persuaded.

I guess it's somewhat definitive of libertarian to consider the answer to "should X be allowed" to always be true, until someone gives a very convincing argument otherwise.

Bitcoin is not "legal tender" nor is it a government-backed currency. It is a contract for trade based on a nearly secure system. If you can buy discount coupons or tokens and trade them for goods and services, why not Bitcoins? Not only is this virtual currency helpful, but the purchase price changes to reflect the relative risk and combined value of the purchasing currency. Apparently the value of a non-regulated currency has appreciated about $40 per unit over the last month.

I am just not keen on the idea of the US government being the one to do it.

Is Bitcoin restricted to the US only? In that case, it would be up to the US to look after its own.

The problem is that the US government regularly shows that it has as much idea about "international" as I have about gynaecology. It's complicated, do do with other people and it really helps if you actually know where the patient is.

You can tell the suitability of someone to have any say in something trans national if you find out how they feel about it being regulated by a UN body.Yes the UN contains corruption but so does every government in the world and the US one is well known to be in corporate pockets to an impressive degree.

Sure Congress can identify Bitcoin use as gambling or something and that will keep it under control of the Mafia where it belongs but fortunately, the remaining 96% of humanity can ignore their veniality.

Let me end this right now. It's unregulateable. They can try to nip at the heels of the exchanges but other than that, it's impossible. Nobody runs it, nobody controls it. It's distributed, encrypted, and transactions cannot be modified or blocked or intercepted or duplicated. So that sort of makes any "decision" pointless.

It's trivial to regulate. On the mild end of regulation a BC user probably violates a few IRS and local taxation laws per transaction. On the harsh end of regulation BC transactions may be made illegal.

You can still hold illegal BCs and you can use them - just as you can own a "hot" handgun and carry it illegally. Once you are apprehended this becomes an additional charge. Nobody will to go after you unless you are "a person of interest." Once the authorit

Translating "Should Bitcoin Be Regulated?" into its plain meaning, that is, "Should peaceful Bitcoin users be threatened with harm, or harmed?" should yield the answer almost immediately: of course not, any more than any other peaceful people should be harmed, whether they want to sell or consume "large" sodas, trade or manufacture "high" (standard) capacity firearm magazines, use drugs, give food to the hungry, or engage in any other pursuit that is not directly harmful to other people or property. How can it ever be right to so threaten and harm peaceful individuals? And is not all regulation such a threat - give us money or we will harm you (take the money by force, cage you, murder you if you resist); conform to our requirements, even though you do no harm, or we will harm you? There is no case where such harm is justified.

Bitcoin is already regulated by somebody, so it is only a question of who gets to write the rules. It's a bit like PayPal - they do all the things a bank does, but they escape bank regulations by not calling themselves a bank - I don't think I need to reiterate all the complaints against PayPal, so I won't, but they are getting away with these things because they don't follow the normal banking rules.

The reason we have laws and standards regulating the handling and production of money is to protect society, ie mostly ordinary people. And the reason the rules have to be written by the legislature is that self-regulation never works in favour of people, it only works for the said industry. At least the government has to consider all the industries, and who knows, maybe even the people sometimes.

As far as I can see, somewhere behind Bitcoin there's a group of people who are making a profit from it, and whose profit would be diminished by having to follow rules meant to protect the ordinary user. I haven't been able to find out who they are; IMO, you should never trust a business who doesn't want to look you in the eye. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money out of something, so why hide behind anonymity? It is certainly not because they are saintly idealists who only want the best for you. Remember the old saying: "If it's too good to be true..."

Wow, that's an entirely laughable concept. Its quite easy to regulate- make it illegal to accept it as payment, and arrest anyone who takes payment in it. It wouldn't entirely stamp it out, but it would make it useless in day to day commerce, which will relegate it to a niche in black market trades at best. In reality it would pretty much kill it in any country that did it- normal people are not going to use a currency where you have to track down an underground website thats constantly being changed i

In addition, they just 'prove' that Bitcoin is being used to circumvent Money Laundering laws, and that the admins SHOULD have known/built tracking in, and they get arrested for RICO act violations, and the founders/admins/server admins, do life in Federal Prison. Lather, rinse, repeat like they did for the mob, and...

What do you mean "should have"? Bitcoin is probably the most trackable currency ever created - anyone who wants to can readily trace every transaction of every bitcoin back to the moment of it's first creation. It's only "anonymous" in that your name isn't directly attached to anything and you have the option of easily sending your coins through a shuffling (aka money laundering) service. The only difference where money laundering is concerned is that it's cu

"Should have" was meant in the legal way. By building in money laundering without tracking, they ARE in violation of RICO. That means they Can do life without parole, as can anyone who assists, the second the govt decides to crack down. They can say " we don't know" and the govt says "you should,and should have, retroactively" life in jail for not playing the game tends to end this stuff

Interstate commerce. This one is even legitamate, if the server running the exchange and the user aren't in the same state it is interstate.

Or as mentioned various anti-money laundering statutes. Or declare that exchanges are banks (they are in a lot of ways) and regulate them under banking statutes. Bonus if they can get PayPal declared a bank at the same time- that's well overdue.

Two things: 1) The lack of a provision in the constitution doesn't seem to deter Congress from making laws as a general observation. 2) I'm pretty sure that if challenged, they would cite the Commerce Clause.

The constitution prohibits the states from making a legal tender of anything other than gold or silver. It also authorizes the federal government to issue coinage. It has no prohibition at all on private parties making coinage or scrip.

Or, go move to the Democratic Republic of the Congo or other similar place with effectively no government and see how unlimited liberty really works. Turns out that when there's no regulation, when people can do whatever they please you get a lot of people who's idea of "freedom" is "the freedom to oppress, kill, and harm others."

There's a reason why free nations actually end up needing a government, laws, regulations, and all that kind of shit. You have to keep people form shitting on the rights of others. If you don't, some people will, it is just the way humans are.

Some security is necessary if we want individual liberty, and if we want to be able to live and enjoy that liberty. That does not mean that all security is good, that we should trade off liberty for no reason (like with the TSA, which isn't even useful security wise and is just a dong and pony show) but stop quoting this like it is some kind of maxim, like we should just toss out all regulation and let people do whatever the fuck they want. We can see, time and time again, in history what happens when that goes on. the result is not good.

Unlimited liberty requires security of oneself and one's property. Government should simply be the collective use of force in defense of private property rights. Bastiat had it figured out over a hundred years ago: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html [bastiat.org]

You end up with an outright slave society, since anyone who has any kind of advantage over anyone else can use it as leverage to gain ever more draconian agreements, leading ultimately to de facto or de juro ownership.

Yours is a bad idea, even if we ignore the obvious problems of there no longer being regulations against selling tainted food and other such lovely details.

Put it this way, the rest of the population is even dumber than/., for that reason alone nothing should be regulated, because who do you think comes up with regulations and votes for people that set regulations?

Yeah, one more bitcoin story. I have an idea for a/. story - how about one on how Raspberry Pi's can be used to mine bitcoins? That should be a double whammy here for/., since they'd get to cover 2 of their pet topics.